


This is the Backbone of America

by scioscribe



Category: Arrested Development
Genre: F/M, Family, Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-25
Updated: 2013-07-25
Packaged: 2017-12-21 08:06:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/897931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because Ann is the coolest girl in the world, they go out for dinner that night to a burger place Steve knows.  Ann orders a cheeseburger with barbecue sauce and a root beer float, and Steve falls in love abruptly, like he’s tripped on something, watching her lick ice cream off her fingertip while she cleans off the rim of her glass.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is the Backbone of America

**Author's Note:**

> There have been all these Steve Holt/Ann Veal shipper feels going around on Tumblr and I couldn't resist. I think someone came up with the fanon name Luke for Ann's son, too, so I do not take credit for that and if someone can remember who it was, I would love to credit them specifically. (ETA: It's Doyle, or daisiestdaisy on Tumblr, and she has the best headcanons.) Also, singingtomysoul just now wrote a better and soon-to-be-longer version of this exact same premise and I just read it and despaired in the face of its brilliance.

**1**

It is just a heck of a day. Steve has the whole house sheathed in plastic and it’s as hot inside as pool-side concrete in July, so when he goes outside for lunch, he knows he smells like sweat and pesticide—sort of like deviled eggs that have been out in the sun too long. So he’s pretty thrilled when the lady next door brings him over a Coke that’s sweating about as much as he is. Sometimes people are just nice like that.

But what’s even nicer is that she recognizes him and just like that, he recognizes her, and wow, she’s pretty.

“Ann!” he says. “It’s me.” He lifts his arms, even though they sort of ache from holding the spray-hoses all day. “Steve Holt!”

She tucks her hair behind her ears. Her hair is the color of honey on toast, and Steve really, really likes honey on his toast. He buys his dad’s, which comes delivered two pots at a time, really irregularly, so he’s always having to buy the little teddy bear plastic bottles from the store, too. His dad would probably sell more honey if he had a better distribution system, but getting a small business off the ground is hard work, Steve knows.

“I can’t believe you recognized me,” Ann says.

Steve blinks. “Why wouldn’t I recognize you?”

Because, like, she helped him film that thing with the footprints and she didn’t laugh at him when he kept having to redo it because the tide kept going up between his toes and making him laugh on-camera, and he knows she tried to get his dad to talk to him more, and she has really pretty lips and eyes and fingers. Why wouldn’t he recognize her?

“Sometimes people don’t.”

“Sometimes people don’t recognize me either,” he says. “Like, because of my hair, maybe? Sometimes people are just bad with faces.”

**2**

Because Ann is the coolest girl in the world, they go out for dinner that night to a burger place Steve knows. Ann orders a cheeseburger with barbecue sauce and a root beer float, and Steve falls in love abruptly, like he’s tripped on something, watching her lick ice cream off her fingertip while she cleans off the rim of her glass.

The menus are sticky with ketchup stains and the all Steve wants is her, anyway, so he blanks on what he’s supposed to tell the waiter and ends up with chicken fingers and honey mustard, somehow, which are probably not what he wanted but sort of delicious? Even though they’re a little kid’s kind of thing, which is probably what makes Ann lean urgently across the table, her hand skidding like an inch away from his— _pretty_ —and say, “Just so you know, I have a five year-old son.”

“Okay,” Steve says. “Cool. I like kids. Do you think he’d like some chicken fingers?”

They gather up chicken fingers in a little Styrofoam box to take home.

Ann says, “I was almost your stepmother.”

Steve thinks about that. “I’m glad you’re not,” he says. His dad’s honey is always faintly salty, like someone’s been crying in it, but Steve keeps renewing his monthly order anyway, so he thinks he’s allowed this moment of selfishness. He really likes Ann a lot.

Anyway, he thinks his dad might be gay, because he’s been making out a lot on YouTube with Tony Wonder, but Steve is waiting patiently to be told what this means. Although he’s already bought Mr. Wonder a Father’s Day card because it’s almost June and he doesn’t want to leave it until the last minute.

**3**

Luke Veal is the coolest, just like his mom: he likes Legos and Easy Bake ovens, so Steve happily settles into Saturday afternoons eating tiny chocolate chip cookies and rescuing Lego people from collapsed buildings.

It turns out Tony Wonder is Luke’s father, which is sort of funny to say because of _Star Wars_ , and since Steve still can’t find Dave Holt, Luke is totally his favorite brother (unless he does find Dave, in which case they will be tied, because that’s only fair). He thinks it’s safe to call Luke his brother, too, because the other night he took his dad out for dinner and his dad talked about the Kinsey scale a lot before saying he’d learned a lot about love and wanted to make things right with them, which apparently meant showing Steve a lot of pictures of him and Tony Wonder at some sort of ball pit? And a blurry one of them having sex, which is not something Steve wants to see his dads doing, if that’s okay.

“I’m dating Ann,” Steve says, when it’s time for him to talk, which is about three minutes before the check comes. But his dad pays now, because Tony’s kind of rich, so that’s different.

His dad gives him this absolutely confused expression, which is pretty much how he looked in the picture of him having sex, and says, “Ann?”

“Ann Veal. You two were going to get married?”

“Oh, _her_. Right. But we didn’t, though?” and he seems to actually be asking Steve the question, so Steve thinks over what he knows for sure, which is that Ann really loves him and wouldn’t lie to him about something like that.

“You didn’t,” he says firmly.

“Okay. Because one time I did marry this chick whose name I could never—well, that’s great, then! Young love!” He clasps Steve’s shoulders and looks at him super-intensely, like newly discovered bisexuality has given him laser vision. Steve suddenly realizes that in this moment, he is the absolute center of his father’s attention: it is both exhilarating and terrifying, and his heart feels like it’s going to pump its way out of his chest and onto his floor, although Ann has him on cholesterol medicine now, so it probably won’t.

His dad says, “I am really happy for you,” and Steve starts crying, because he’s his father’s son, after all.

**4**

Steve has not slept with a lot of people because four is not a lot, but Ann is his favorite, he thinks, because by the time they have sex, he knows her better than he knows anybody else in the world.

Like: he knows the exact shade of pink on the sole of her foot and he knows the little white half-moon scar there from where she stepped on a broken seashell the first time she took Luke to the beach. He knows her favorite hymn is “Abide With Me” and he knows that’s because she thinks she’s made mistakes but she’s lived through them, and all she wants is a God who will forgive her and live with her, quiet, the way Steve is quiet now. He knows she likes dogs and turtles more than she likes cats. He knows that she loves her family and can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t. She reads science fiction novels and historical romances and she likes to grab him by the collar before they make out, so he’s started wearing collared shirts. She smells sort of like vanilla and sort of like Play-Doh, because of Luke.

She likes his dad’s honey and she likes their families getting together because it lets her make jokes about masks that only she, Steve, and his GOB-dad understand, because for some reason his Tony-dad doesn’t remember it. Steve knows a lot of forgetful people, but he knows Ann isn’t one of them. He knows that she remembers his birthday the same way he remembers hers and Luke’s.

He knows she’s slept with both of his dads, but even though that’s a little weird, he doesn’t see how anyone could mind it, because everything before them—except for Luke, he corrects, because Luke had to happen, Luke is so awesome—wasn’t meant to be, the way they are, because they’re the real thing, like when his GOB-dad gets drunk at parties and gives his Tony-dad a lap-dance because love is the backbone of America. You have to be pretty into someone, Steve figures, to think that you’re holding the country together, but that’s how he feels about Ann, too, like when he takes her hands in his and lifts them up above her head and back against the pillows, the insides of her wrists silvery in the moonlight through the curtains, they are somehow at the center of everything and the world without her would be meaningless and fall apart and there wouldn’t be patriotism anymore or anything.

**5**

They get married in autumn, and Ann wears a dress that Steve thinks is just the coolest, because it sort of looks like a curtain, and in the bathroom at the reception hall, he gets on his knees and draws it back, up to her thighs and higher, and she shivers, braced against the sink. Pastor Veal is outside taking pictures of everybody and Uncle Buster has his hand stuck in an ornamental white plywood gazebo and Uncle Mike is all sad-eyed and playing indoor-croquet with Luke and Aunt Lindsay is making campaign speeches.

Steve’s mouth tastes like champagne and then like her, and she’s saying, over and over again, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”


End file.
